We've heard from Rafael Benitez recently that football is about the project and not about winning trophies (surely the comment of a loser?), and now Paul Hayward in The Observer says Arsene Wenger must win trophies at Arsenal to rubber stamp his project. See the difference?

Arsenal force us to confront a philosophical tangle. Do a club need to win things to bring meaning to their endeavours or is the pursuit of creativity sufficient to justify the effort? This is where Wenger's problem starts, because he cannot cultivate artistic football without promising something at the end of it. Hence the constant depiction of this new Arsenal as a train you can hear coming in the night but not quite see.

This was vintage Wenger, in midweek, after the 4-1 Champions League win over AZ Alkmaar: "We grow from game to game. We get stronger from game to game and it's important to keep that attitude to progress and improve, play for each other and improve even more. We have to believe in our future."

There is a whiff of the hustings about this. If Barack Obama is accused of governing America by speeches, Wenger might be charged with chasing trophies by eloquence. Except that he has held plenty of English metal: three Premier League titles, with two League and FA Cup Doubles. The question is not whether he can convert romanticism into silver but whether he can do so now on the furthest borders of his own aesthetic principles.